Andrew Casson

Andrew Casson
Andrew Casson at Berkeley in 1991 Photo courtesy George M. Bergman
Born	1943 (age 80–81)
Alma mater	University of Liverpool
Awards	Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry (1991) Fellow of the Royal Society (1998)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Yale University University of California, Berkeley University of Texas at Austin
Doctoral advisor	C. T. C. Wall
Doctoral students	Daniel Allcock Stephen Bigelow Danny Calegari Greg Kuperberg Mahan Mitra Andrew Ranicki

Andrew John Casson FRS (born 1943) is a mathematician, studying geometric topology. Casson is the Philip Schuyler Beebe Professor of Mathematics at Yale University.

Education and career

Casson was educated at Latymer Upper School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a BA in the Mathematical Tripos in 1965. His doctoral advisor at the University of Liverpool was C. T. C. Wall, but he never completed his doctorate; instead what would have been his Ph.D. thesis became his fellowship dissertation as a research fellow at Trinity College.

Casson was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin between 1981 and 1986, at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1986 to 2000, and has been at Yale since 2000.

Work

Casson has worked in both high-dimensional manifold topology and 3- and 4-dimensional topology, using both geometric and algebraic techniques. Among other discoveries, he contributed to the disproof of the manifold Hauptvermutung, introduced the Casson invariant, a modern invariant for 3-manifolds, and Casson handles, used in Michael Freedman's proof of the 4-dimensional Poincaré conjecture.

Awards

In 1991, he was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry by the American Mathematical Society. In 1998, he was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society.

External links

• Official Home Page
• The Hauptvermutung book (including Casson's 1967 Trinity College fellowship dissertation)
• Proceedings of the Casson Fest (Arkansas and Texas 2003) A conference to celebrate Casson's 60th birthday, with biographical information.
• Photos from conference, including the `honorary degree' presented to Casson by the participants
• Andrew Casson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project